Director Jesse Johnson's blood-spurting, female-fronted, WWII grab-the-gold actioner is no women's answer to Inglourious Basterds or even Kelly's Heroes (Kelly's Heroines?). If anything the material skews a little closer to a twist on Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Largely nasty folks are driven by greed, against the ethical cesspools of the collapsing Third Reich.
Marie DuJardin (Nina Bergman) is, on the surface, mistress to a powerful SS officer Von Bruckner (Daniel Bernhardt), who loves her dearly and reveals to her a cache of ingots he plans to use to get them to safety after the war. But despite his romantic overtures, Von Bruckner has a murderous side and kills several French Resistance fighters in front of Marie.
Years later, after the liberation of Paris, Marie is one of many women loudly branded traitors and shamed (her hair cut in public) for consorting with the Nazi invaders. Immediately after that humiliation, she is taken hostage by a small band of renegade United States G.I.s led by Major Maitland (Louis Mandylor), who threatens further brutality if Marie does not lead them to the late Von Bruckner’s gold.
But wait! Flashbacks reveal Marie herself was acting as a French Resistance deep-cover agent; she claims she was planning to give the gold to her countrymen, but the mission fell apart when the other Free French bungled their planned ambush on Von Bruckner.
In a small cemetery, Marie, the crude Yankees, another surviving French Underground maquis, and fleeing remnants of the German SS all collide over gold and revenge. What holds the viewer's attention a bit is the question of whether Marie really is an unjustly accused Gallic freedom-fighter or a scheming femme fatale on nobody’s side but her own. What may actually get viewer's attention, though, is contrived plot mechanics (including the extreme unlikelihood that all the gold might still be in play at all).
Actress-model-singer-vegan-activist Bergman, mostly clad in what looks like a hand-me-down of the ragged slip Fay Wray wore on Skull Island in King Kong (no explicit nudity), registers as a strong presence, and the rest of the thespian ensemble is game to go along with the ride—whether the script seems to careen in the direction of a feminist statement or serving up mere grindhouse-gore thrills. At least for the action fans, it delivers, and this pulp yarn constitutes, if not gold, then a worth-weighing optional purchase for B-movie library shelves.
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